After Brown - Initial Attempts at Integration

When the Supreme Court announced in its unanimous
Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) that the doctrine of "separate but equal" had no
place in public education, Prince George's County public schools operated
under a dual system that was in keeping with an 1872 Maryland law requiring the
separate education of black and white children. The system in Prince George's
County was completely segregated. Students attended segregated schools. The
buses were also segregated, even though buses carrying black students and
buses
carrying white students often traveled over the same roads. Teachers were
assigned to schools on a segregated basis, teaching only students of their own
race and almost always reporting to supervisors of their own race, although
some black teachers reported to white supervisors. If the superintendent had
to address all the teachers in the system, he did so in separate meetings for
black and white teachers.[9]

After the Supreme Court made its decision in Brown, the
Maryland state
school board released a statement confirming that it would stand by the
decision but noting that it would need an "effective date" to be set by the
tribunal before it created and implemented a plan for integration. The Prince
George's County superintendent, William Schmidt, issued a statement a few days
later declaring that he expected "to operate [the Prince George's County]
school system during the 1954-55 term on the same basis that the schools have
been operated during the 1953-54 term."[10]
Another year would pass before the
Supreme Court required school systems to integrate "with all deliberate
speed."[11] During that year, Prince
George's County did little to prepare or implement a plan for desegregation,
aside from appointing 17 local whites and 5 local blacks to the "Fact-Finding
Committee to Study the Problems of Desegregation in Prince George's County."
On July 21, 1955, the committee submitted the findings of its study to the
county board of education. A major section of the report was devoted to
showing the possible results of assigning students to schools "without regard
to race." These results were based on "pupil assignments' that were only
nominally nondiscriminatory" but they still showed that 47 of the 106 schools
slated to operate in 1955-1956 could be desegregated and that this
desegregation would actually require more teachers, stamping out the fear
that some teachers might have to be fired if the dual school system was
consolidated
into a unitary system.[12] The
committee
did not outline a specific desegregation plan; however, it did suggest that
"insofar as it is administratively and economically possible, pupils
irrespective of race, should be allowed to attend the school closest to their
homes" and that "the present policy of fixed school boundaries can be
continued, but on an integrated basis. . . ." The committee also advised the
board of education to take desegregation into account when building new
schools
and to desegregate teachers and staff along with students.[13]

For the 1955-1956 school year, the board decided to adopt a "freedom of
choice" plan similar to those adopted by many other Southern and border
states.
With a few relatively insignificant changes, the Prince George's County school
system operated under this plan from the 1955-1956 school year to the
1964-1965
school year. The freedom of choice plan automatically registered students in
the school that they would have attended under the old system, but they could
choose to attend the school of their choice, provided that their parents
specifically request a transfer. Allowing students to attend the school of
their choice could have produced a fair amount of desegregation on its own.
The stipulation that parents specifically request a transfer, however, meant
that blacks would be placed in black schools and whites would be placed in
white schools unless the parents demanded otherwise, therefore placing the
burden of changing the status quo on the parents. In addition, the board
seemed to go out of its way to make transferring difficult. The steps
parents had to go through to request a transfer were not well publicized and
transfers were only accepted during a limited time period. Even if a parent
sent in a transfer request on time, it could still be one of the many requests
that were denied by the board.[14]
Despite these obstacles, the number of black students enrolling in formerly
all-white schools steadily grew in the 10 years the plan was in action,
although the vast majority still attended all-black schools.

In implementing the freedom of choice plan and also in some of its later
school constructions, the board stated that it "based its action on certain
recommendations suggested by [the] Fact-Finding Committee. . . ." Most parts
of the plan, however, either did not particularly support or actually directly
contradicted the recommendations of the Fact-Finding Committee. The distinct
possibility that a black student might be transported past a closer all-white
school in order to attend an all-black school still existed. There was not
even a guarantee that a student who requested a transfer to a closer school
would have the transfer granted.[15]
And
the Fact-Finding Committee did not want to have the burden of changing that
status quo placed on black parents; as one white member of the committee
stated, "We felt that the initiative for desegregation should come from the
school system rather than from Negro parents." The board also did not take
desegregation into account when planning the building of new schools and
additions to old ones, as specifically requested by the Committee. No wonder
members of the Committee felt that they and their report "had been used as
window-dressing. . . ."[16]

In reviewing the steps the board took towards achieving desegregation through
the freedom of choice plan, it seems quite plausible that the board's actions
were influenced by covert racist attitudes. The Fact-Finding Committee gave
the board some broad guidelines to follow in creating a desegregation plan. A
plan that followed these guidelines would have made some significant steps
towards integration of both students and faculty while avoiding the
elimination
of many jobs and perhaps even creating new ones. Yet the board either ignored
or specifically went against most of the guidelines when creating its plan.
It
then made the most important tool for achieving integration - the
parent-requested transfer - difficult to obtain by not publicizing the
directions for requesting a transfer well and by rejecting a significant
number
of requests that did follow the directions. Perhaps the board's most
suspicious action was that of withholding a major section of the Fact-Finding
Committee's report from the media and the public, the section that showed that
a desegregation plan that was "only nominally nondiscriminatory" could still
integrate almost half the county's schools in its first year. The idea that
the board withheld this portion of the report to cover up its racist attitudes
and prevent a public outcry over the relative slowness of the board's
desegregation plan does not seem too far-fetched. One thing is clear: the
board did not move as quickly to desegregate as, according to the Fact-Finding
Committee, it could have, and it never disclosed the reason for this
slowness.